A Good House Read online

  Some of the book’s pages were stained and many of the margins were filled with Sylvia’s own handwriting, cryptic notes she’d made to herself. Often she had devised variations or substitutions. On some pages there was a check mark or a question mark, sometimes a warning to herself: Careful when doubling, or, Sounds better than it is, or, Everyone hated this, except Bill, who maybe just didn’t want to say. On some pages a name had been written in the margin and firmly underlined.

  Standing over the stove after school started that September, absent-mindedly stirring a soup that had been dropped off by her grandmother, Daphne leafed through the pages, looking for her own name. She eventually found it beside the recipe for Sea Foam Icing: Daphne, it said. Birthdays and other.

  Margaret did not impose herself. She left them more or less alone to sort things out, calling only occasionally to ask if there was anything extra that needed to be done or to say that she was going over the border and did anyone need socks, underwear, khakis? The first time she was invited for a meal she hadn’t prepared, she restrained herself, behaved as a guest would, graciously accepting Daphne’s no when she asked if she could help with the dishes.

  She didn’t work with Bill at the hardware now. She had accepted an offer to cross the street to the pharmacy, where she was paid a substantially higher wage to keep a set of books that were not much more complicated than the hardware books. Bill told her he hated to see her go but he wasn’t the guy in charge so he couldn’t do anything about raising her pay.

  As a going-away gift he gave her a pearl cluster brooch that he’d found nestled in cotton batting in a small blue box in Sylvia’s dresser. When Margaret asked, he had to say he had no idea how Sylvia had come to have it.

  Six weeks after the supper when she didn’t wash the dishes, Bill and Margaret began to meet at the Blue Moon for their coffee breaks, sitting always in one of the smaller booths at the back. Sometimes they met for lunch, BLTs or soup of the day.

  When it became clear to the wits that Bill had abandoned them, one of them told him in what passes in men for a whisper, “Just don’t be too long about it. We can’t guarantee your spot forever.” It was the first joke anyone had directed at Bill in a long time. They all recognized a possibility when they saw one and they could see no purpose in his trying to continue on alone with those kids. None of them could have done it.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY, AFTER one of Margaret’s roast beef dinners, Bill asked everyone to stay around because he wanted to talk to them. Patrick and Murray were home for the weekend. Patrick had been coming home regularly, picking up every hour he could get at the feed mill. Supper had been conversational, lively. The boys were full of talk. Classes were indeed huge, professors were indeed weird, jocks thought they ruled the campus and were pretty much correct. No one bothered much with small-town boys.

  Bill had not bought Margaret a diamond because she told him she would be happier with just the one ring, but the kids all knew what was coming and Bill knew they knew. He said the words he had decided to say, careful not to show any undue affection to Margaret, who sat across from him. He mentioned the word “mother” several times and, near the end of his very short speech, the words “make a life.”

  He understood that what he was about to do would be seen by some as too big a change too soon, or worse, just plain selfish, as if he were thinking mainly about himself. He had tried to prepare Margaret for a bit of resistance because he believed the kids were entitled to it, although he couldn’t guess how their resistance might show itself. When they only nodded and tried to smile, each nod around the table an indication to him that they were ready to offer up the hardest gift they had ever been asked to give, before he’d even felt it coming he had made a private, lifelong promise to each of them, separately.

  He had made his decision about Margaret in the late fall, the night he took her to the horse races in London, to thank her for all her time and trouble. It was the first time in twelve years that they had been absolutely alone together, with no expectation of interruption. On the way home, after she told him he was more than welcome, he reminded her of all the years they had worked side by side and then without flinching he asked what she would think about getting married.

  Margaret smoothed her silky skirt over her long legs and then reached to touch his arm. She told him yes, she thought that would be the best idea.

  If anyone had wanted to know, Margaret would have said that she felt honoured to be asked into Bill’s life. There was that kind of formality around him now, maybe around any man in his position. But she would have said too that a man’s love for a woman should get its start when the woman is young. She would have said that a man’s love for a woman past thirty, say, was in fact love for the younger, remembered woman, the feeling strengthened maybe with time and familiarity, but really and always, if you could strip away the time and familiarity, you would see it was the younger, remembered woman who was loved, the basic woman. She would have said that she believed this was one of the main differences between men and women, because you could begin to love a man any time.

  After they’d got back to town, Bill had parked his car on the street and gone up the stairs with Margaret to her apartment above the Hydro office. She stood very still while he lifted her sweater over her head and unzipped the long silky skirt. She was wondering as she stood very still how she could possibly begin all this with him, the actual touching, the actual movements of intimacy. She was forty-one years old. A good part of her experience with men had been gained when she was quite young and, more recently, before the possibility of Bill Chambers, while the lovemaking in her narrow bed had been by necessity discreet, perhaps because it had been discreet and limited in possibility and self-contained in its secrecy, it had been, compared to this, now, dreamlike. Like a dream. This now was meant to be the pleasurable evidence not of a true, prohibited, longed-for love but of Bill’s plain desire that she should be with him in his life, through his life. She waited for her body to accept this difference. She relied on her instinct. Bill moved slowly, took them through it slowly. Her instinct told her to let him do this.

  Once begun, it was not so difficult. The missing fingers were not missed and his skin under her tentative hands, under the surprisingly symmetrical islands of his dark body hair, was like warm crushed velvet, like something you might touch in the real, daylight world, a very fine, once-in-a-lifetime gift.

  When their first moving together was done, curled into herself, holding herself, she told him that she could feel it in her fingertips. It had travelled like an undertow all the way through her. Gone everywhere.

  Bill stretched out beside her in her narrow bed, sated and confused and quiet. He could not tell her, he would never be able to tell her how strange it was, the way Sylvia, a smaller woman, had seemed to fly apart when it happened for her, how he sometimes had to hold her tight to keep her in one piece and how other times he just pulled away to laugh and watch her fill the bed, watch her fly, and here she was, Margaret, a much larger, beautifully long-boned woman, making herself so small in his arms and in her own.

  He had not tried to convince himself that he loved Margaret, not yet, but he did believe that a certain kind of marriage could be made from need and gratitude and amazement. He believed that Margaret’s long-boned presence among them would keep the house safe, and familiar, and that in time, after some months or years, he would discover that he did love her. You could find love waiting for you. He believed that. And besides, he was not young. He did not wish to be young again.

  Comforting her, stroking her arching neck and resting the back of his hand against the vein pulsing there, he began to construct a small sealed room to preserve and protect his life with Sylvia, to hold and protect all the past. There would be no end to what the room could contain and he would step inside at will, he would for the rest of his life remember everything, anything, any time he pleased. But he would never allow himself to speak to the things housed in that room beca
use there could be no answer and he believed that such a silence would be the hardest thing his life could ever give him.

  1956

  BILL AND MARGARET were married at the Anglican manse on a Friday night in early February. They had talked about going in to the courthouse in London but then Bill suggested the minister who had shingled the bathroom roof and Margaret voiced no objection.

  The ceremony was small and quick and private. Bill’s parents had not been invited, although they’d told him to go ahead and do what he thought was right, because Margaret’s mother and father had both died quite young, in the war years, and Bill didn’t want her to feel entirely outnumbered. She had only one much older brother who had long ago moved to Nova Scotia and he could not have been expected to make the trip just for a wedding. The kids were there, of course, and Murray tagged along, arriving at the house in his suit ten minutes before they left for the manse. Bill’s brother Gerry and his beefy wife Eileen came up from Windsor to witness the nuptials, the sister-in-law a determined, spirited woman who was always interrupting people with apropos quotes from Doctor Norman Vincent Peale. After an hour of listening to Eileen’s relentless cheer, Margaret was glad to remind herself that Windsor was still thought to be a very long drive. There was no formal reception after they left the church. Celebration wasn’t really wanted.

  Angela Johnston, who was Margaret’s bridge partner and oldest friend, had made an angel food cake with pineapple filling and dropped it off that afternoon, had opened the fridge and rearranged things herself to make room for it. Good wishes and a few small gifts came to the house over the following weeks, but informally. The wits and their wives bought them the blue punch bowl set that had been sitting in the window up at Taylor’s, calling it when they brought it over one big gift instead of a lot of smaller, useless things.

  Margaret sold most of the furniture she’d had in her apartment over the Hydro office to an auctioneer. What she didn’t sell she stored in the basement at Bill’s, expecting that it would be carried up some day down the road and used by someone just starting out. Otherwise she brought with her only her car, a 1954 Pontiac which she said she was ready to make available to Patrick for dates and to the others when they started to drive, a low, round, mahogany table with scalloped edges that was one of the very few beautiful things her mother had possessed, a nearly complete set of good bone china, her hardly used silverware, and her small, recently purchased television set. Although the house did not yet have an antenna up on the roof, Paul carried the television in and placed it on a table in the living room, rearranging all the chairs to face it.

  Margaret tried to be careful not to disturb things. She did partially empty Sylvia’s kitchen cupboards and organize the dishes and the canned goods to suit herself, explaining to everyone as they watched her do it that a tall woman wanted a slightly different set-up.

  Bill had convinced himself after that first night when they got back to town from the horse races that it was going to be all right for them, but sometimes with no warning he would have long, hard days of remembering Sylvia, bits of her from different times, and he would want her back, badly, he would want their time back. He told Margaret it was like a rancid ache just under his skin, between his bones and his skin. He said this was the only way he could think to describe what was wrong with him.

  A month before she died Sylvia had told Bill that anything might happen. Lying in their damp bed he’d listened to her worries about the kids and then he’d heard her describe a probable life for him in the arms of some other, unimagined woman, heard her say clearly that he wouldn’t have any choice, he would just have to trust his needs and take it as it came. She said she believed that if she were in his shoes, that’s what she’d do. She would just have to.

  Although Margaret was carefully casual with Bill in the company of others, in their own bed she stroked him and tried to soothe him. She praised Sylvia. She talked about Sylvia with all the affection she could muster, about her courage, her spunk, how she had loved her children, the way she could mimic people, the way she could get everyone laughing. She prodded Bill to remember Sylvia’s take on his sister-in-law, made him laugh with her, remembering. Margaret believed she could do this, allow Sylvia to continue on in him. They weren’t kids.

  Gradually her kindness began to work its magic and eventually she found the courage to say that, like it or not, life simply has to be for the living. She told him it was a good thing to keep living. When Bill confessed like a sinner that what he really felt was lucky, lucky having had Sylvia and now having her, Margaret nodded yes in the dark and pulled him down, hoping only that because her own body was so different from Sylvia’s he would be able to believe that this was a very separate thing he was doing now.

  In the early spring, after some blunt but encouraging counsel from Doc Cooper, she allowed herself to become pregnant, guessing correctly that babies sometimes alleviate suffering. Walking uptown to work on a bright, clear morning, watching the branches on the trees along the streets sway with the new weight of buds, she willed the sperm she had just received an hour before to give it their very best effort. There will be prizes, she told them.

  The kids didn’t bother themselves with thoughts of Margaret in bed with their father. They, too, were not without instinct. The harder adjustment was watching her large hands on their mother’s belongings: her aprons, her Mixmaster, her clothespins, her sewing machine, the junk in her junk drawer. The irritations were petty and jolting, the way she blew her nose in short, quick bursts, and her bags, her growing cache of bags, the way she flattened and folded every bag that entered her domain and tucked it in a drawer, just in case.

  Living on her own in the long, narrow apartment above the Hydro office, working at her oversized desk at the back of the hardware store, all those years entering her ledger numbers precisely for an easy balance at month end, her only deviance an occasional ticket for speeding on her way into the city, Margaret had once in a while taken some time to imagine a life something like this one. Among the many choices she’d imagined she would have, things like clean windows and lots of them, good meals carefully prepared and nicely served, a mirror in a bathroom opening on a private, ordinary mix of male and female toiletries, she had always thought she would call a daughter Kathleen and a son Tom.

  But late in the summer, when her condition became so evident it had to be taken into account, Daphne, meaning only to make a show of maturity, to be seen to be accepting of this baby and all its implications, brought the naming to the supper table as if she were absolutely entitled to do this, asking Bill as she added another possibility to her list, “So who named me?”

  Margaret sat back and let them do it. Stephen it was. Stephen Thomas. Or Sarah Kathleen. Sally.

  * * *

  HOME FOR THE summer in early May, Patrick had got a promotion at McFarlane’s mill. He was now driving a one-ton truck around the countryside making deliveries, heaving sacks of feed on and off the truck, getting brown and bulking up. Late in the afternoon Margaret would lay out fresh underwear and pants and a shirt in the downstairs bathroom and watch for him at the kitchen window, listen for his footsteps on the gravel driveway. He’d come home coated in a cloud of feed dust and stand in the middle of the backyard to slap his pants and shirt hard and bend over to shake the dust from his hair and then he’d quickly strip to his underwear on the back porch, ducking into the bathroom to shove his head under the tap and wash for half an hour before anyone heard from him.

  Although he had assumed he would, Patrick had not liked living in residence much at all. The room was a lot smaller than the bedroom he shared with Paul at home, and John, the roommate assigned by alphabetic proximity, was a loud-mouthed, back-slapping jock from Ottawa who called girls wimen and acted as if he’d just discovered booze and couldn’t seem to get enough of either.

  John introduced Patrick to his many, many friends and prodded him to come with them to the Brass Rail to find some friendly small-town wimen who might h
ave their own apartments, their own apartments being the first and only consideration. Thinking there was a chance he had the guy all wrong, Patrick did go along for one of John’s “crime and corruption” nights but at the end of it he found himself in the arms of a not very pretty girl who had no idea what was going on, who said almost nothing but welcomed him into her bed as if it meant something. Her own roommate was in the other bed with some other guy, not four feet away, moaning and whispering, and when everyone else fell asleep, he got dressed quickly and left. He didn’t even want to remember the not very pretty girl’s name.

  He said nothing, certainly didn’t tell Murray, and he turned down all further invitations. He watched John’s marks nosedive and hoped he’d flunk out, thinking, If there’s a God, this guy’s gone. Some small hesitation had kept him from telling John that his mother had just died and by October he was glad he’d hesitated.

  All his classes were huge. He hated that, the amphitheatres, the fact that not even the professors knew him by name. He and Murray ate lunch together between classes and they worked in the library, went to the odd Mustangs game, drank quietly at the Ceeps where they met but did not take up with several pretty, lively young women who were away from home for the first time too and game for almost anything anyone might propose.

  But now it was summer and he wanted someone, needed someone. After several weeks delivering feed, twice to the Elliot farm, he had phoned Sandra Elliot to ask her to go out to the Casino dance on Saturday night. Sandra was going into grade twelve with Daphne and he remembered her from high school, vaguely. He’d heard from Daphne that she had just broken up with some guy from Parkhill and he assumed correctly that they had worked all this out ahead of him, that his call was expected. Both times when he’d pulled into the yard with feed Sandra was just coming out of the house, as if by chance, and when he’d finished unloading she leaned against the truck to talk to him, turned and lifted her head quickly to make her dark red hair swing. She focused on him with big easy smiles, used her posture to make sure he was aware of her breasts, and bending to pet one of the dogs, offered little glimpses of very white cheek not quite hidden by short shorts.